BPD with a thing for Sociopathic Men

Anyone else out there have a thing for sociopathic men?

I have fallen for three and each relationship was more devastating than the one before.

I am now actively working to recover from the last relationship and to try to address how my borderline personality made me particularly susceptible to the draw of a sociopath, and how my constant fear of abandonment kept me engaged with him for far longer than i should have been.

I also asked the question on here about jealousy - i have strong jealousy issues, but his cheating and lying made made my jealousy go off the charts. He was tired of reassuring me, but he was cheating on me the whole time anyway...so ugh, what a mess.

Anyone else?

Uhm... not men, but I've felt like it, yes.

I dated a girl that I swear felt nothing at any point. She cheated on everyone she was with; she was incapable of accepting flattery without pursuing the flatterer. She to this day refuses to accept that she did anything wrong or hurt anyone, even when she had confessed having cheated on several occasions to a mutual friend.

But then... when you feel too much, it sortof seems like everyone around you is numb. Food for thought.

Jealousy is an insecurity reaction, I believe. That constant fear of abandonment rearing it's ugly head...

It's a vicious cycle - afraid of abandonment, we pick people who abandon us during the relationship by cheating; we feel abandoned and afraid of abandonment, and then they blame us and say we're insecure.

Both the jealous BPD and the cheating sociopath are to blame here for the parts they play. But the BPD is so much more helpless. As a BPD, I have hurt far fewer people than I have hurt, mainly because I have worked on not hurting others. But I haven't worked as much on not hurting myself. That's my next task...

Were lying and cheating the main relationship problems with all three of the sociopathic guys you dated?

The lying may not have always been vindictive in nature, there are plenty of reasons for guys like that to lie in relationships, but sometimes it's for the sake of keeping the relationship. I'm guessing you caught them lying about a lot of things though.

The cheating could have been because they had opportunity to cheat so when they saw an opportunity to do something, they did it as a sociopath would, whether it could be destructive or not. It could have also been to deliberately make you jealous for a sense of power over you or revenge against you for crossing them in some way.

The first sociopath was a beginner. He was just learning to use his power (and being a socio is a power). He was trying to be a good husband, and he was with me because he felt so incapable of being that good husbad. His lies got worse over time. He didn't make me jealous really.

The second sociopath was more advnaced. He pursued me for a year, begging me to be serious about him. When I finally gave him a chance, he ran from me. Turned out he was sleeping with 22 other women. That number cames from court documents he showed me (he was getting divorced). It was not me...it was definitely him. But my role was in letting it go on past the point where I alreadyknew what was happening on some level.

This latest sociopath was a near pro. He's a cypher...no real job..he has pretend jobs in the art/film industry. BUt no one thinks he can act or write And his resume is full of lies (he translates works but makes it seem as if he WROTE them). He was already seeing someone when he started to see me, and on that first date, he told me, there were no other women. It was his con. It was what he told all women. He's really repulsive, and if I wasn't so afraid of being abandoned, i would hae either confronted him earlier or just walked the hell away. I learned an important lesson. And that was....as important it is to ACT like a decent person and not do bad things that your BPD brain tells you to do, it is also important to EXPECT TREATMENT from others that is decent and respectful, and no matter how afraid you are of being alone, you have to demand good treatment.

Sounds like they were interesting fellows to say the least. I can relate to the lying and being controlling, but I've never physically cheated on anyone, never seen the need to honestly.

The biggest complaint about me from my ex's besides being domineering and controlling is that I broke all of their morals and they didn't like who they became by the end of the relationship.

My ex (bit of the backstory on your other post) had this epiphany the day before she told me she needed to get help or our relationship was doomed. She said "Tonight I realized something profound. Every relationship I've had, every abuser... they were just like my dad. I actually seek out men who are like my father."

And from the limited contact I had with him, he was emotionally unavailable, had a grandiose sense of self and it felt like he looked down on everyone. He was incredibly invalidating, as if it were instinctual, and he seemed to possess no sense of remorse or awareness. He seemed to want his family to be what he needed them to be so he felt accomplished, was an alcoholic and used to physically abuse his own daughter.

I don't know if the men you end up with seem to relate to a parental figure or not but it's been mentioned elsewhere on the forum that, for some people, that treatment is all they really know... so it's familiar to them and there's an odd sense of safety or comfort because, despite being toxic, they know how it works and what they need to do in the relationship.

Is any of that helpful?

AJR8 - you've asked me some interesting questions, and I have for the most part, kind of let them slide by without answering them. The reason was that I thought you were a woman who was making excuses for your own sociopathic boyfriends. I finally realized that you are a sociopath? If not, I apologize....

But, if you DO fall somewhere on the sociopath continuum, I'd like to give your answers some fairer consideration (if you are a woman who is making excuses for a sociopathic boyfriend, then do yourself a favor and disregard this!):

1. "Were lying and cheating the main relationship problems with all three of the sociopathic guys you dated? The lying may not have always been vindictive in nature, there are plenty of reasons for guys like that to lie in relationships, but sometimes it's for the sake of keeping the relationship. I'm guessing you caught them lying about a lot of things though. "

First of, lying and cheating became more of an issue with each relationship. In the first, he lied and cheated to his wife...and eventually to me. In the second, he lied and cheated to both his wife and to me. In the last one, he lied and cheated to me AND I believe to his ex-wife, who he did not have an objectively reasonable reason to lie to (he DID have a reason, I am sure, and I am sure that it had something to do with remaining financially dependent upon her).

Second, the lying was NEVER vindictive directly!! It never is. It ALWAYS is for the sake of keeping the relationship. If you are a sociopath, yourself, I understand why you wish for there to be an actual distnction here. But it's like asking, 'Did you eat the ice cream because you wanted to get fat or because you liked the ice cream?" BOTH can be true on some level, but one is far more subconcious, and one is far more rooted in the here and now. A socio will lie because they have to in order to maintain their status quo. They CHEAT because they can. They see themselves as able to cheat because they ARE vindictive, they DON'T care, they ARE entitled. I know, because I used to be a cheater myself.

2. "The cheating could have been because they had opportunity to cheat so when they saw an opportunity to do something, they did it as a sociopath would, whether it could be destructive or not. It could have also been to deliberately make you jealous for a sense of power over you or revenge against you for crossing them in some way."

The cheating was of course because they saw an opportunity. But you have to LOOK for there to be as any opportunities as mine had. In ALL three cases, they were on dating websites the whole time we were together. In the last case, the guy had a girlfriend when he started seeing me, and we started seeing each other after months of platonically getting to know one another, where he told me over and over that he was not having any dates because he had given up on that method of getting to know women. So, in the last case, the guy was ALWAYS on dating websites, ALWAYS collecting names and numbers of new women, actually began seeing a girl who he led to believe he was exclusive with, and THEN started seeing me. When we started seeing each other, I believe, based on intuition and piecing things together, that he WAS exclusive for about a month, that he stopped seeing the others, stopped adding others. But that one day for one reason or another, he decided it wasn't giving him what he felt he deserved and was entitled to, and he decided that he owed it to himself to go back on the pursuit of fresh meat. At that point, he did not start to see the girl he had been seeing before me again, not immediately. But he was doing "something" with "someone", that I do know.

Did any of them do it to "make" me jealous and get power over me? 100 percent NO. They ALL did things that made me jealous and made me feel powerless, but the cheating itself was not for that purpose. They never wanted to be caught. All of them wanted to see me as the good girl, the girl in front of whom they could do no wrong, and for them to have me see them cheating would have been counterproductive. BUT that did not stop them from cheating, and the cheating, itself, made them feel powerful and dominant.

And the last man was a self-admitted BDSM Dominant. The other girl he was seeing believed she was his "slave" (full time, 100 percent slave). I was led to believe that I could NEVER be his "slave" because I was too "good", although he certainly participated in BDSM activities with me, and I accepted it as part of what I needed to do if I didn't want him to abandon me.

I hope that i have helped you see the flaws in your justifications for cheating.

If a person wants to cheat, why not have a relationship with someone who doesn't care if you cheat so you can get away with what you want? If you want to cheat, why date a distrusting person with eyes on the back of their head who feels abandoned at the slightest (perceived) transgression let alone a real one? That's asking for a very specific type of hassle.

IMHO a person who feels the need to see you as the "good girl" has something else going on in cluster B other than straightforward sociopathy.

MadMage wrote:But then... when you feel too much, it sortof seems like everyone around you is numb. Food for thought.

I was trying to allude to a point here, but I feel I have to expound on it a bit more... you know, since I've got nothing but time today, hehe.

All right, so - the point I was making is that it is far easier to pass the blame onto the other person and make them out to be 'wrong' and the cause of all of the problems in the relationship. Our problem specifically is that because we feel so strongly, it seems odd to us when we don't see obvious emotion in other people... and once we've split them, EVERYTHING they did suddenly looks malicious.

Now, the girl I mentioned before did have some issues, so I wasn't entirely wrong about her... but I wasn't entirely blameless, either. I didn't want her going out, smoking, drinking and I was constantly wary of any other man she spoke with - my fears caused my to be restrictive, and she had no knowledge of the reason behind this other than to call me controlling; which certainly didn't mean she would be able to try to help me cope. Instead, she resorted to protecting me from it by hiding it from me so she could live the way she wanted. Eventually, she reached the point where she was no longer happy in our relationship and went outside of it for comfort.

This isn't to say you didn't date some guys who were lacking in the empathy department, of course. I'm simply trying to share a few revelations I had after ALL of my relationships took the same exact path to destruction; basically, I had to look at it and say, "whelp, the common denominator here is me, I guess"... and then it was like putting on a new pair of glasses! Well, I imagine that's what it would be like... if I needed glasses... you know. *shrug*